This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The poem opens with ambiguity, confusing its reader in a way that is perhaps similar to how the landscape bewilders the speaker. “This” is already surprising with its lack of an antecedent, and also turns out to be “the light of the mind” rather than the light of the moon. Instead of shepherding its reader into the church graveyard where the poem is set, the poem first presents the speaker’s mental image of the space—a place that is “cold” and hostile, at once private and “planetary” (relating to an entire planet, whether it be Earth or another celestial body). Line 2 continues with descriptions of the imagined trees (which may include the yew tree) and the light of this graveyard. Notice how these elements are reduced to colors (“black,” “blue”) and broad adjectives (“cold and planetary”) rather than being described in detail. The unwelcoming, brutal atmosphere of the nocturnal landscape makes it difficult for the speaker to closely observe, orient herself among, or communicate with the objects around her.
The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair.
Here begins the description of the moon—an unwelcoming and upset, silent yet dominating figure in the landscape. The negation (“The moon is no door”) suggests that unlike a door, which joins separate spaces, the moon does not enable connection nor, for instance, provide the speaker an emergency exit from her loneliness and fright. The moon is also sentient and independent, rather than inanimate like a door—“a face in its own right,” with its own thoughts and feelings. The face of the personified moon is both “upset” and “[w]hite as a knuckle,” suggesting the adjectival idiom “white-knuckle” (causing fear, excitement, or tension) and producing a color contrast with the “dark crime” of the night and the black trees of Stanza 1. The multilayered metaphor of Line 10 (“It drags the sea after it like a dark crime”) compares the sea to something that can be dragged (like a fishing net or cloth), then this draggable object to a “crime” that causes shame or secrecy. Despite its resemblance to an open mouth (“the O-gape of complete despair”), the moon produces no sound. It is a mysterious ball of fear, grief, and hostility.
The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
Lines 15–18 construct a familial dynamic among the yew tree, the moon, and the speaker. The tree, like the speaker, looks to the moon: reaching toward the heavens, it resembles a Gothic church, whose arches and spires are similarly designed to “point[] up” toward the divine. The word “Gothic” not only evokes the architectural style, but also the Goths (the Eastern Germanic people) as well as Sylvia Plath's German father. Hovering over this paternal tree, the maternal moon (“The moon is my mother”) is aloof and sinister, a blasphemous parody of “Mary” (the Virgin Mary, often dressed in “blue garments” in religious images) who is “not sweet” and produces creatures (“small bats and owls”) evocative of the winged, nocturnal Satan. The speaker finds herself between a hostile mother and a powerless father, between an unreachable moon and a feeble, earthbound tree.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness—blackness and silence.
The poem closes with the moon’s apathy and the yew tree’s silence. Commenting that the “[t]he moon sees nothing of” the ominous night and all its ghostly movements, the speaker implies that the moon disregards her as well. Line 27 also stands parallel to Line 17 in its structure and content, with two terse full stops (“The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary”) as well as side-by-side contrasts between traditional ideals of maternity (e.g., the Virgin Mary’s sweetness, cordiality, and beautiful locks of hair) and the moon’s absolute rejection of them (“She is bald and wild”). Abandoned by her mother-moon, the speaker is also distanced from the uncommunicative yew tree, whose message is nothing but “blackness—blackness and silence.” Its “blackness” evokes death, darkness, and loss, and its “silence,” like the moon’s quiet “O-gape” that does not produce any speech, positions the speaker against the enigmatic and indecipherable. The poem thus ends with neither the moon nor the yew tree becoming more hospitable or accessible to the speaker (or reader) of this poem.
